Water
Water has the aspects of nutrition, ecology and ethics over its extraction, distribution and storage. The nutritional aspects refers to quality of water including its nutritional content; the ecological aspect refers to the ecological consequences resulting from the extraction and distribution of the water; and the ethical aspect refers to the consequences brought to other lives by these processes.
Ground water is the primary source of usable water in many geographies and maintaining a healthy ground water reserve is the only sustainable way to ensure abundance of usable water. Every method of water conservation, including dams and artificial reservoirs, are unsustainable, ecologically unsafe and ethically unsound, inflicting long term undesirable consequences to both life and other resources. The true way to conserve water is to let nature conserve it through means such as ground water assimilation.
The most ecological, natural and cost-efficient assistance to soil's water assimilation is vegetation. Dense vegetation like grasses restrict the free flow or evaporation of water from the surface, stagnating more water there than otherwise. The roots of plants softens the soil and help it hold and penetrate more water, which is then assimilated to the water table. Vegetation builds a small scale reservoir on the surface and buys time for assimilation.
Any human action that prevents ground water assimilation or renders the existing ground water useless is against the principles of natural living.
Essential requirements in the context of water refer to drinking, cooking, cleansing of all life forms, household chores and irrigation for farms; non-essential requirements include water for swimming pools, beverages and other commercial uses that are non-essential to life. When ground water is abundant, it can be shared by all; but when it is scarce, using ground water for non-essential requirements is against the principle of natural farming. Non-essential requirements must rely on desalination plants that are ecologically and ethically.